James Fallows

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. More

James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

 
Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.

False Equivalence Watch, Steubenville Edition

You can consider this a kind of open-letter response to the many, many emails that have come in about the video below. This clip displays quite an astonishing sample of "false equivalence" framing by the press -- but one that has nothing to do with budget policy, the filibuster, or any of those tired old warhorse topics. 

Watch this report from CNN on yesterday's Steubenville verdict and see if you can figure out who the real victims were in the aftermath of the rape there. If you're in a hurry, the passages from times 1:10-1:40 and 4:20-4:50 will give you the idea. (The Atlantic Wire covered this yesterday, with links to other discussion. But not yet with the false equivalence angle!)



UPDATE: Incredibly and yet inevitably, the Onion fully predicted this development.

Ten Years Later, What Paul Wolfowitz 'Owes to the Country'

Thumbnail image for IraqInvade2.jpgAndrew Bacevich has a wonderful essay, in the form of an open letter to Paul Wolfowitz, in the current Harper's. You have to subscribe to read it -- but, hey, you should be subscribing to any publication whose work you value. This essay isolates the particular role Wolfowitz had in the cast of characters that led us to war. As a reminder, they included:
  • Dick Cheney, who was becoming a comic-book churl by this stage of his public life;
  • Colin Powell, the loyal soldier, staffer, and diplomat whose "Powell Doctrine" and entire life's work stood in opposition to the kind of war that he, with misguided loyalty, was to play so central a role in selling;
  • Tony Blair, the crucial ally who added rhetorical polish and international resolve to the case for war; 
  • Donald Rumsfeld, with his breezy contempt for those who said the effort would be difficult or long;
  • Paul Bremer, whose sudden, thoughtless dismantling of the Iraqi army proved so disastrous;
  • Condoleezza Rice, miscast in her role as White House national-security advisor;
  • George Tenet, the long-time staffer who cooperated with the "slam-dunk!" intelligence assessment despite serious disagreement within the CIA; 
  • and of course George W. Bush himself, whose combination of limited knowledge and strong desire to be "decisive" made him so vulnerable to the argument that the "real" response to the 9/11 attacks should be invading a country that had nothing to do with them.
But Paul Wolfowitz was in a category of his own because he was the one who provided the highest-concept rationale for the war. As James Galbraith of the University of Texas has put it, "Wolfowitz is the real-life version of Halberstam's caricature of McNamara" [in The Best and the Brightest].

Bacevich's version of this assessment is to lay out as respectfully as possible the strategic duty that Wolfowitz thought the U.S. would fulfill by invading Iraq. Back before the war began, I did a much more limited version of this assessment as an Atlantic article. As Bacevich puts it now, Wolfowitz was extending precepts from his one-time mentor, Albert Wohlstetter, toward a model of how the United States could maximize stability for itself and others.

As with the best argumentative essays, Bacevich takes on Wolfowitz in a strong rather than an oversimplified version of his world-view. You have to read the whole thing to get the effect, but here is a brief sample (within fair-use limits):
With the passing of the Cold War, global hegemony seemed America's for the taking. What others saw as an option you, Paul, saw as something much more: an obligation that the nation needed to seize, for its own good as well as for the world's....

Although none of the hijackers were Iraqi, within days of 9/11 you were promoting military action against Iraq. Critics have chalked this up to your supposed obsession with Saddam. The criticism is misplaced. The scale of your ambitions was vastly greater.

In an instant, you grasped that the attacks provided a fresh opportunity to implement Wohlstetter's Precepts, and Iraq offered a made-to-order venue....In Iraq the United States would demonstrate the efficacy of preventive war.... The urgency of invading Iraq stemmed from the need to validate that doctrine before the window of opportunity closed.
Bacevich explains much more about the Wohlstetter / Wolfowitz grand view. And then he poses the challenge that he says Wolfowitz should now meet:
One of the questions emerging from the Iraq debacle must be this one: Why did liberation at gunpoint yield results that differed so radically from what the war's advocates had expected? Or, to sharpen the point, How did preventive war undertaken by ostensibly the strongest military in history produce a cataclysm?

Not one of your colleagues from the Bush Administration possesses the necessary combination of honesty, courage, and wit to answer these questions. If you don't believe me, please sample the tediously self-exculpatory memoirs penned by (or on behalf of) Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Bremer, Feith, and a small squad of eminently forgettable generals...

What would Albert [Wohlstetter] do? I never met the man (he died in 1997), but my guess is that he wouldn't flinch from taking on these questions, even if the answers threatened to contradict his own long-held beliefs. Neither should you, Paul. To be sure, whatever you might choose to say, you'll be vilified, as Robert McNamara was vilified when he broke his long silence and admitted that he'd been "wrong, terribly wrong" about Vietnam. But help us learn the lessons of Iraq so that we might extract from it something of value in return for all the sacrifices made there. Forgive me for saying so, but you owe it to your country.
Anyone who knows Andrew Bacevich's story will understand the edge behind his final sentence. But you don't have to know that to respect the challenge he lays down. I hope Paul Wolfowitz will at some point rise to it.

For another very valuable assessment of who was right and wrong, when, please see John Judis's piece in The New Republic.

How We Thought, and Think, About Iraq

Thumbnail image for IraqInvade2.jpgI'll try to work through a number of items on this topic today. Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the start of the ruinous invasion of Iraq.

1. The ongoing effect. A reader in the upper Midwest writes:
I still believe that many people, perhaps especially in Washington, don't understand what a searing, formative experience the whole run-up to the war was for a generation of Americans--maybe more than one generation. (I'm 46.) The obvious propaganda campaign, the clearly trumped-up WMD scare campaign, the bullying that was the functional equivalent of redbaiting directed against naysayers, and finally the invasion itself: This disaster transpired in broad daylight, in slow motion, with millions around screaming for it to stop. But the Beltway crowd would not stop. Who could have witnessed this with eyes open and not be terribly, terribly sobered about the state of our political system, and the trajectory of our country?

While I agree entirely with your critique of the war as summarized at the end of your post, it does focus on the invasion as a strategic blunder for the United States. Surely it was. But was not the fundamental issue the invasion's sheer lack of moral and legal justification? This was plainly a war of aggression against a country that had done nothing to us and posed us no threat. George W. Bush and his enablers made my country a rogue nation when they embraced the atrocious doctrine of preventive war, previously associated closely with fascist regimes. This is the worst of all, and for this there has been no accounting at all.
To address briefly the final point: my judgment as of the springtime of 2002, as a reporter and a civilian, was that I had no special leverage in addressing the legal-and-moral wrongness of the war. I thought it was wrong to attack a country that hadn't attacked us, and said so in interviews and on shows. I thought the main additional information / judgment I could bring to the discussion was airing the unanimous view of experts in the region, and in military occupations, that "regime change" would unleash a host of other consequences that together would be worse -- for America, for the region, and arguably for Iraq -- than continuing to exert "non-kinetic" pressure on Saddam Hussein.

IraqAd.png2. Who was right. Last week Stephen Walt reminded us of an advertisement placed on the NYT's op-ed page six months before the war began. It had the headline shown at right, and it was signed by 33 scholars of international relations.

It is very much worth looking at that ad again, and reflecting on the list of signers. Almost every detail of the case it made has stood up well over the past decade. This was its argument:
  •     "Saddam Hussein is a murderous despot, but no one has provided credible evidence that Iraq is cooperating with al Qaeda.
  •     "Even if Saddam Hussein acquired nuclear weapons, he could not use them without suffering massive U.S. or Israeli retaliation.
  •     "The first Bush administration did not try to conquer Iraq in 1991 because it understood that doing so could spread instability in the Middle East, threatening U.S. interests. This remains a valid concern today.
  •     "The United States would win a war against Iraq, but Iraq has military options--chemical and biological weapons, urban combat--that might impose significant costs on the invading forces and neighboring states.
  •     "Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state.
  •     "Al Qaeda poses a greater threat to the U.S. than does Iraq. War with Iraq will jeopardize the campaign against al Qaeda by diverting resources and attention from that campaign and by increasing anti-Americanism around the globe."
The people who signed that ad were right. They were startlingly right. The people who argued the opposite  -- Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, Abrams, Feith, sadly Powell, of course Bush, much of the "liberal hawk" establishment notably and stridently including The New Republic and the Washington Post's editorial page -- were wrong. In most cases unrepentantly wrong. Yet here is the remarkable thing: in ongoing deliberations about Iran, Afghanistan, and overall U.S. strategy we now hear more often from the "wrong" camp than those who were right.

Here are the 33 signers. It is a remarkable list. Not all of them are still around -- I particularly miss the voice, company, and integrity of Charles Moskos, and I am glad to note my college classmate Steve Van Evera -- but many are. As we think about Iran and other threats, I would like to see two op-ed or extended talk-show appearances by members of this list, for each one appearance by someone who was so gravely mistaken a decade ago:
Robert Art, Brandeis; Richard Betts, Columbia; Dale Copeland, Univ. of Virginia; Michael Desch, Univ. of Kentucky; Sumit Ganguly, Univ. of Texas; Alexander L. George, Stanford; Charles Glaser, University of Chicago; Richard K. Hermann, Ohio State; George C. Herring, Univ. of Kentucky; Robert Jervis, Columbia; Chaim Kaufmann, Lehigh; Carl Kaysen, MIT; Elizabeth Kier, Univ. of Washington; Deborah Larson, UCLA; Jack S. Levy, Rutgers; Peter Liberman, Queen's College; John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago; Steven E. Miller, Harvard University; Charles C. Moskos, Northwestern; Robert A. Pape, University of Chicago; Barry R. Posen, MIT; Robert Powell, UC-Berkeley; George H. Quester, Univ. of Maryland; Richard Rosecrance, UCLA; Thomas C. Schelling, Univ. of Maryland; Randall L. Schweller, Ohio State; Glenn H. Snyder, Univ. of North Carolina; Jack L. Snyder, Columbia; Shibley Telhami, Univ. of Maryland; Stephen Van Evera, MIT; Kenneth N. Waltz, Columbia; Cindy Williams, MIT
To make this impolitely specific and blunt: before the next talk-show booker, op-ed page editor, think-tank event coordinator, or other gatekeeper on public attention invites the next Bush-era veteran or former advocate of invading Iraq on to share his or her wisdom, I ask that they include some people from the list above, or others whose judgment looks better rather than worse with the passing years.

3. Failure of accountability. From another reader in the Midwest:
In order to rally American opinion towards invading Iraq, the George W. Administration needed to: 1)  reverse the verdict on Vietnam; and 2) reverse the verdict on the related Powell Doctrine.  Colin Powell was a product of Vietnam.  The Powell Doctrine mandated limited goals, quick action and the use of overwhelming force as key criteria in deciding the use of US military force.   Powell's goal was to keep the US out of frivolous, unnecessary and quagmire-inducing wars, the three qualities most attributed to the Iraq invasion!

The neoconservatives in and around George W.'s War Cabinet were busing airbrushing the lessons on Vietnam and the Powell doctrine throughout the 90s.  All those 'realists' associated with H.W. Bush and the first Iraq War were put on the defensive after 9/11 and vilified as 'appeasers' for not invading Bagdad in 1991.

The political system actually worked at holding the prosecutors of Vietnam accountable: Johnson resigned, the Church committee held contentious hearings, the CIA was 'tamed.'  Everything associated with or against the war was Big News.

But, as you said, after Iraq the neocons remain.  They are the walking dead. One reason may be the difference in nature between the two wars.  Soldiers were drafted in the '60s, a volunteer army serves today.  No one could escape Vietnam, but if you knew no one on the front lines in Iraq, you could tune out the bad news.  And although President Obama busted through the finish line (2008) because he opposed the Iraq invasion, he has not drawn sharp lines against the George W. Bush Administration and neoconservative dogma. 

So, in 2013, we face a serious situation.  The Administration hasn't presented any over-arching framework for pursuing American power or redefining the US role in the world.  It is neither a strong voice against neoconservatism or strong one for realism.  The Obama Administration read the public disgust with foreign adventures by refusing to arm the Syrian rebels.  On the other hand, in bombing Libya, it continued to tramp over the Powell Doctrine.  By expanding the use of drones, it's ushered in a whole new approach to modern warfare.  All without debate.   What happens when other countries arm their drones?  Do we need eight aircraft carriers along with precision flying machines?

There you have it: a vacuum into which all sorts of retread, base or hypocritical ideas of foreign policy have been pushed.... We are in a self-perpetuating loop.  Those who don't know do all the talking; those who do know keep their mouths shut.  
4. Cowardice pays. From a friend who was in government through the Iraq-Afghanistan era:
1. The past isn't past: Some of the worst failures in the Iraq debacle have-- by never really being punished-- become enshrined as matters of both policy and national identity.  To take just one glaring example: Abu Ghraib was the most sickening instance of institutionalized abuse by the US military to have come to light since at least the Vietnam War, arguably far longer.  Yet not a single officer was truly punished for it (BG Karpinski, who wasn't even truly responsible, got a one-grade demotion; nobody except a few NCO's served a day in the brig).  Needless to say, not a single civilian politician suffered even a career setback.  The result: Every policymaker now knows that there are no genuine limits on what you can get away with: At worst you'll end up like John Yoo, with cushy tenure and plenty of lucrative speaking deals. [NOTE: The incoming message originally and incorrectly said "John Woo," who is a film director, rather than John Yoo, the Bush Administration lawyer.]

2. Cowardice pays.  Every policymaker knew, or should have known, that allegations of WMD were wildly overblown at best, and pure fiction at worst.  This information was available to everyone with a security clearance (everything that would subsequently come out about Saddam's purported nuclear and biological programs was available: I read it all, and was briefed on it, while the war resolution was being debated; the only surprise was the non-existence of chemical warfare stocks, which were always a red-herring for Americans outside of Iraq and its immediate neighborhood).  A case could be made that war supporters were duped by neo-con hawks in the Administration and their cheering-gallery in the media-- but the information was there, and there were plenty of informed sources telling policymakers the truth.  Nobody can claim they weren't warned.

For St. Patrick's Day, Dancing Hungarians!

Turn to me for your seasonal Magyar/Hibernian connections. I mention the item below purely because I love it. But if you imagine the dancing figures in the video not as folk dancers from Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, performing a Hungarian dance, but rather as Irish country cloggers, you can make this seem wholly relevant to St. Patrick's Day. 

What I love is that this is simultaneously preposterous and erudite. It's an accurate-while-ridiculous animation of the way the computer algorithm known as "quicksort" works. The logic behind quicksort is to put a list of items into order through a recursive series of "greater than / less than" tests. You could read all about it here or here. Or you could just watch the video. 


I also love this comment on the YouTube version: "It would have been cool if it was multithreaded." That's true -- you would have had dancers on both sides doing simultaneous "pivot" tests after the first partition --  but it's a full success as is. My admiration goes to whoever had the weird imagination to think this was worth the effort. It was.

 PS The video itself is recursive, so you get the point pretty quickly. It just repeats the sorting process all the way to the end.

False Equivalence: Where It Came From

You know the syndrome. And, hey, if you've forgotten, check these two recent examples. Today several hypotheses about its origins. First, from a reader in Colorado, the idea that the false-equivalence reflex -- "extremists on both sides are blocking progress on the budget" -- comes from a kind of mirror-image mentality:
I've had a similar reaction to politicians and pundits (virtually always on the right, it seems these days) who assume that just because they are for something, the people on the other side must be against it, or vice versa.

So, if they think there should be "less government," then the rest of us all think the answer to every problem is "more government." Or because they purport to be single-mindedly focused on less spending, the rest of us are for out-of-control spending. It puts a straw man front and center and then bashes it, which the press doesn't call out enough either.
A reader in Connecticut says we are seeing a grown-up, political-world version of schoolyard bullying:
I am particularly amused by the current meme that somehow the blame lays at Obama's, and by extension, the Democrats' feet.  So they have to give in because everyone understands that the Republicans are so set in their views that they won't change, so it's up to Obama to compromise?

I think that this ties in with the new attention that Emily Bazelon has given to the problem of bullying with her book [and related Atlantic article] Sticks and Stones.  One thing that hasn't been pointed out is that bullying exists, even in adults.  Furthermore, bullying by supposed adults often works at the highest levels of politics and business.  In sum, if a group of kids acted like the Republicans in Congress, refusing ever to even even acknowledge that there are legitimate points of view that contradicted their own, and refusing to do anything unless they got their way completely, wouldn't the teacher think that they were attempting to bully the rest of the class?
Another reader, Shreeharsh Kelkar of MIT, offers a social-science explanation:
I share your frustration with the false equivalence that's practiced by the big newspapers.

But I wonder if I might offer a perspective on bipartisan think based on my discipline: the history and sociology of science.

You say in one of your posts that the thinking behind it seems to be that reality is somewhere between the positions of the two parties. And there's something to that. But I think one of the ways of explaining it is using a concept called "boundary work.

Boundary work is a kind of rhetorical work that is performed in public argument: something is asserted to be science by stressing what it is not (pseudo-science, or faith, or religion, or what have you). Even Tim Geithner did it in his exit interview when he painted his own work as just a kind of technocratic problem-solving rather than politics, see this analysis

It seems to me that our political discourse also contains a similar kind of boundary work -- between "politics" and "policy." Our politicians will always say: what I'm doing is just plain old common sense or the right thing or just good policy, or just the solution to a problem; whereas what my opponent is doing is playing politics. And if one sees politics as actually a way of managing relations between conflicting groups of people, one can see why they do that. 

For instance, reforming the American health care system is almost certainly a matter of redistribution: taking money from older people and giving it to others (the uninsured, younger people, etc.). But one can't say that if one is a politician, and so there is a delicate balancing act: one's own work is constructed as problem-solving and policy-making, the opponent is portrayed as playing politics (where politics is understood to be trading off between different social groups).

I think this kind of boundary work exists in journalism too (and more on why it exists later); it's what you call false equivalence (and Yglesias calls bipartisan think). Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing. It is imperative, I think, in this model that both parties be painted in the same brush. Because if you don't, then you agree with one of the parties, which therefore makes you political.

Why should the newspapers practice this kind of boundary work? My sense (which comes straight from Paul Starr's history of the media) is that it's a holdover from the times when the newspaper industry changed. As we all know now (from arguing about partisanship), newspapers in the 19th century were unabashedly partisan. They also catered to niches, and made money from subscriptions. And that changed sometime in the 20th century when newspapers started to make money from advertisements -- and therefore they had to be less partisan and attract more people. Hence the objective tone of the reported stories (he says, she says) -- and also I think the false equivalence of the editorials.

Interestingly enough, we're now back in more partisan times, thanks to the Web. And it's interesting to me that you, Matt and others who call the editorials on their false equivalence operate in a completely different new media ecosystem; you have readers of a certain kind and stripe (but lots of them thanks to the reach of the Web), you don't really need to be bipartisan. But I think the example of Ezra Klein proves my point: ever since he's moved to the Washington Post, he's a lot less rough(er) on Republicans than he used to be. He won't fall into the false equivalence trap for sure but he's certainly adapted to a different audience. (I think it's great that he's reaching more people).

So - I don't think the WaPo is ever going to abandon its false equivalence model; not unless it becomes a completely new kind of WaPo (which it might very well become!).

I don't mean to suggest of course that all editors are dumb actors acting out a premediated sociological script; just that the roots of false equivalence go pretty deep into our current system.

I suspect this analysis is not particularly new to you (with some jargon added!).
Indeed this is an analysis I've thought about before -- thanks to Starr's book, and Jay Rosen's, and many others', and Breaking the News back in the 1990s. But I had not known about the "boundary work" label, which is usefully clarifying. It's a long road ahead.

The Sequester, as Seen From Inside the Military

Most of the country seems to be edging into an "ehh, who cares? It's all politics!" attitude about permanent-emergency government funding. Here is a note from a serving officer about what "the sequester" means from inside one branch of the military.
I've been in the Air Force for a little over four years, and was in training for four years before that. I've recently returned from a small cantonment in the desert, and am stationed overseas in the western Pacific. And I'd like to tell you that the sequester is having a very real effect on our lives here.

But first, a brief recent history lesson. As long as I've been in the Air Force - even when I was a cadet and we were in the midst of two wars, the military has tried to do more with less. In 2006, the Air Force cut down its personnel numbers in an effort to save money that could be used on newer planes. Naturally, the less people meant there was a higher deployment tempo - people were heading to the desert for longer amounts of time and more often. To make up for the smaller number of military personnel, contractors and civilians were asked to take on a bigger role.

I'm sure you've heard about how big a presence contractors have in these wars - the reason for that is a government attempt to save money. Shortly after that, when the recession hit and the stimulus came and left, again we were in a "constrained fiscal environment," as our leadership likes to tell us. For the past 3 years, we've been cutting back, spending less on staying trained and ready, trying to decide what training we could go without for the short term until things get "back to normal."

And now that sequester has hit - while we're still in Afghanistan, mind you - what is it that the military is cutting? We're not cutting any missions - all those will continue on, somehow, despite a cut to half of our operational budget. But instead, our training and readiness funds have been cut to the bare minimum. The belief is that it'll come back when things go "back to normal." But worst, of all, our benefits have started to get cut. DOD civilians - who have grown in number as uniformed personnel have shrunk - have just been given a 20% paycut across the Pacific. And for the military, college tuition assistance funds have disappeared across the services.

I don't know whether to rant against Congress, or our military leadership, including the President. I know Congress is responsible for the sequester. But it's the Pentagon who has decided to cut pay and benefits rather than cut missions. We've been doing "more with less" for a half a decade now, all while waiting for things to "get back to normal." Is this really what the people, what Congress wants? That our military is now prepared to do just as much as it did before, but without a force as well trained as before? And with civilians and military taking a significant haircut?

Even if you think the military has gotten too "entitled" with our free healthcare and assistance for college - there are still people fighting out there in a dangerous place. I'm back safe and sound, andwas lucky to have a quiet deployment. recently But I have more than a few friends getting shot at, mortared, and getting blown up while driving down bomb infested roads. Can't we wait until after 2014 before doing this?

I don't know if I'm making a false equivalence in blaming both the executive and the legislature and the pentagon, but frankly I don't care. I understand the military has to share in the burdens of thecountry - but why are our entitlement programs the first to go? The Murray budget plan includes still more military cuts, while the Ryan plan instead is nice enough to just go after veteran's programs. And this isn't even the policy argument talking about our 30-50 year old planes, ships, and weapons. And I know that the military is only feeling part of the pain - the same thing is happening in every federal program across the country.

And all this so that some big shot millionaire can keep his Bush tax cut?

The Phoenix's Role in Climate Coverage

I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the Boston Phoenix. I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone.

Wen Stephenson, an Atlantic veteran who was closely involved in our first online versions (called "Atlantic Unbound") nearly 20 years ago, says that the Phoenix has played an increasingly important role in climate coverage, and thus its absence will be felt there as well as in other fields. I turn it over to him:

A Death in the Family
By Wen Stephenson

We got the news, of course, on Twitter: "Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck."

That tweet came yesterday afternoon from the Boston Phoenix, the storied but struggling alt-weekly, for which the current print issue will be its last. There will be an online-only issue next week, containing an important piece by my friend and fellow climate activist-journalist Bill McKibben. And then the rest is silence.

But a lot of us can't stay silent, and won't. There are a great many people in Boston right now, and around the country, who care deeply about everything the Phoenix has always represented, right down to the end -- smart, fearless, fiercely independent journalism -- and want to say a few things about what this means for our impoverished media landscape.  Many thanks to Jim for lending me this space to offer a few words of my own.

PhoenixCover.jpegI was proud to be associated with the Phoenix, even if briefly. My cover story last fall, called "A Convenient Excuse" (right), took serious issue with the way our mainstream media has covered -- or failed to cover -- the climate crisis. One of the places I criticized was The Atlantic (though I spent seven years as an editor at the magazine, from 1994 to 2001, and still have friends there). [JF note: see my discussion of that piece.]

The Phoenix has run three more of my pieces on climate and the climate movement in these past four months (you can find them, for now at least, here); the last one was just this week, an online piece about a stunning student-led protest against the Keystone XL pipeline at the TransCanada office in Westborough, MA, in which 25 (mostly young) climate activists were arrested for peaceful civil disobedience (a remarkable local story, with national resonance, that the Boston Globe, incredibly, has failed to cover).

There's a reason I'm mentioning these pieces, and it's not to promote my own work (ok, maybe just a little; I'm a freelance writer who just lost my main outlet!).  In all sincerity, it's to pay heartfelt tribute to my editor, the guy who commissioned and expertly edited these pieces -- the last editor-in-chief of the Boston Phoenix -- Carly Carioli.

To put it simply and bluntly: Carly championed not only the climate issue but, equally important, the young and increasingly powerful grassroots climate movement, at a time when virtually no one else (outside of environmental blogs and magazines) could be bothered to give them a serious thought. Those pieces of mine -- to my utter amazement -- went somewhat viral, garnered national attention to the Phoenix, and put the climate movement on the map for a lot of readers. I know an awful lot of people right now who feel a piercing sense of loss, and powerlessness, and quite frankly, real anger, knowing that the only widely-circulated publication in Boston paying serious attention to climate change has gone away.

In today's paper, the Globe's editorial page had an eloquent euology for the Phoenix, where editorial page editor Peter Canellos, like a long list of other accomplished journalists, spent some formative years of his career.  Acknowledging the Phoenix's "proud journalistic tradition," the editorial notes that the alt-weekly's audience "was anyone who believed that powerful institutions and other engines of society deserved a kind of scrutiny that went beyond mere reporting, and who wanted to see the fundamental ills of the social order exposed." And it concludes:

Now, with Thursday's announcement of the Phoenix's demise, much will be written about the paper's impact on local politics, music and film criticism, and the various journalistic careers it launched. It's a substantial legacy, by any measure. But better to focus on the careers that might not be launched, the questions that might not be asked, and the stories that might not get told.

Yes, it's a little ironic to read that on the Globe's editorial page, in whose offices (as I described in the Phoenix) I protested the paper's lack of climate coverage.  We can only hope that the Globe -- or somebody -- will fill the void now left on Brookline Ave. in Boston.

Showdown in Utah: Bulldozers vs. Paragliders

I find this an improbably compelling story. 

Short version: a unique natural mountain configuration has made a site in Utah the best place in America for one particular pursuit. The pursuit is paragliding, and the location, Point of the Mountain south of Salt Lake City, has a very unusual combination of topography and natural windflow that makes it a perfect soaring spot. Point of the Mountain has attracted devotees from around the world, as shown below, and built a substantial tourist economy. But to get more gravel, a mining company has for the past ten days been bulldozing away the very ridgeline that is the basis for this world-renowned activity -- as if earth-movers started chewing up a famous skiing slope or dredging sand from Malibu or Waikiki. It's the familiar story of mountain-top removal mining, in a new setting with new effects.

UtahGlider.jpg

Now the details. Matthew Amend, of Seattle, a glider pilot, sends this report: 
Point of the Mountain is a paragliding and hang-gliding site located on a ridge just a few miles south of Salt Lake City. More free-flight pilots have earned their wings there than any other site in the USA. It has been such a part of the culture there for decades that it was designated as a Flight Park years ago, but that apparently is of no concern to a mining corporation which-- with no warning-- began strip-mining the site a couple days ago.... 

The bulldozers are just enormous. People woke up in the morning and saw the mountain had literally changed shape overnight. Hang-gliding and paragliding are still relatively unknown to the public. Imagine general aviation pilots losing Oshkosh, surfers losing Maui, climbers losing Yosemite, skiers losing Vail... much of the general public would grasp the significance. The Point is like that for free-flight pilots.
 
To me it's another demoralizing example of "Capital don't give a sh*t". It's not that capitalism as we practice it immoral or evil, any more than a swarm of locusts is. It's just amoral and relentless, remorseless.  I've come to think of capitol as being like Plutonium: incredibly powerful and useful, but it needs to be carefully managed and contained, and for God's sake don't allow madmen to get their hands on it.
 
Well, as if you need me to tell you that. You've experienced what it's done to China's air, water, and soil.
Here's a dramatic video made by people appealing to stop the strip-mining, and here's a petition [new link here] to local authorities and the mining company, Geneva Rock. The petition has now reached its target number of signatures, but its argument is very interesting and depressing. UPDATE There's a new petition still looking for signatures. Local news coverage is here, and here is a friends-of-the-mountain link. 
 

This is far from the biggest environmental choice or crisis America faces, but it symbolizes the many others constantly going on. You can fill in the rest of the argument and implications yourselves. 

By the way, the Geneva Rock company is privately owned by a local Utah family, and it prides itself on its commitment to sustainability. Eg: "Sustainability means building for today and tomorrow without depleting future resources. Geneva Rock Products, Inc. seeks to balance the economic, social and environmental impacts of construction today with the understanding that such work will have an effect on the future." Its spokesmen have even said that they want to consider the gliders' concerns. I've asked the company about the latest showdown and will report back when I get their response.

George Orwell on the Filibuster

From today's Politico story about the prospect that an assault-weapons ban will be filibustered in the Senate. Note the three passages in boldface:
The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a hugely controversial ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, but the measure faces nearly certain defeat on the Senate floor....

The Senate now faces a floor fight in coming weeks over Democrats' push to dramatically alter U.S. gun laws for the first time in two decades. While the Feinstein assault weapons ban is unlikely to overcome GOP opposition and get a vote -- as well as concerns from red state Democrats up for reelection in 2014 -- Democrats and the White House will continue their drive to enact universal background checks on all gun sales.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that the assault weapons ban will have a hard time overcoming opposition. "It's pretty clear the other side is locked in opposition [to assault weapons ban.] -- [I] don't see us getting 60 votes," Whitehouse said, referring to the necessary bar to pass the Senate.
I recognize that this theme now lacks novelty value. But here is why it matters to track an engineered usage-change as it is underway:
  • It takes 51 votes to "pass the Senate."
  • It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.
  • Through the past six-plus years, the GOP minority-power strategy in the Senate has deliberately aimed to make the filibuster, historically a rarity, seem routine and acceptable. Every news account that presents the super-majority 60-vote threshold as the "necessary bar" for Senate passage, and a majority of 55 votes as "certain defeat," ratifies this strategy. Especially in an "informed" insider political-specialist publication.

OrwellTyping.jpgIt wouldn't take any extra space to make things clear. The first highlighted passage could say "nearly certain filibuster" rather than "nearly certain defeat." The last passage could say "necessary bar to break a filibuster" rather than "necessary bar to pass the Senate." To look on the bright side, the middle highlighted reference is exactly right: the strategy is designed to keep the proposal from ever coming to a vote. (Thanks to AS for the lead.)

OK, I can't resist: Let's bring George Orwell to bear on this question. Naturally I'm talking about "Politics and the English Language":
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Todays 'Google, How Could You?' Round-Up

Routine personal disclosure: many of my friends work at Google, as does one of my sons.

Routine general disclosure: the world has been transformed, overwhelmingly for the better, by the tools Google offers -- most of them for free.*

With that out of the way: Google, how could you?

Feedly1.jpg1) The end of Google Reader. You can read all about it here at Wired, and at Bloomberg BW. In one sense this is "inevitable" and "understandable." Use of Reader -- essentially a very convenient way to amass, scan, screen, search, store, etc material coming in from RSS feeds -- has been stagnant or falling. And by all reports there is a very convenient alternative: Feedly, with switchover instructions here and logo at right. I haven't made the change but plan to. More alternatives listed here.

So in practical terms this is only minimally disruptive. The larger point is that, for better and worse, it's part of the longer-term, triage-minded "more wood behind fewer arrows" strategy under co-founder and current CEO Larry Page. Back in days of yore, Google was sponsoring almost anything that would entice users to spend more time inside the larger Google ecosystem. It maintained the Google Labs site, itself also now defunct, as an overview of experimental new offerings. Here's a list of projects and features that have gone the same way Google Reader is now headed.

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like. I still feel that way, in particular, about Google's mapping, navigation, and foreign-language tools, and of course its mainstay search function. But as the company pares back its previous offerings, it is inevitably in the role of saying more and more often: You loved this feature? Tough! As Jim Aley puts it in BBW, about what the end of Reader means:
Serious RSS users aren't into it for the luscious jpegged beauty. RSS feeds, taken straight, are a wall of text. That's useful when you want to let news wash over you, to scan screenfuls of headlines without waiting for extraneous pictures to load. When I want to absorb a lot of information fast--which is to say, always--I don't have time for Flipboard. I want exactly what Google will be taking away from me this summer.

GmailOffline.png2) The 'new look' of Offline Gmail. You've probably said to yourself: "You know, I'm sitting here at my laptop computer -- or at my desktop, with its great big screen. But what I'd really like is a way to shrink the usable space of Gmail to what's available when I'm using a mobile phone with a three-inch screen. Why have more, when I can have less?"

If that's the way you think, the designers at Gmail have great news for you. They've found a way to dumb down "refresh" the UI for Offline Gmail (which lets you work with Gmail when not connected, for instance when on an airplane) so that what you see on a "real" computer looks more like your mobile phone. Courtesy of Google's official announcement of the refreshed look of Gmail, at right, is the mobile device- version.

What does this mean when you apply it to a normal-scale screen? Here is a full-screen shot of my offline Gmail account just now. The point is not any of the specific messages, which are bulk mail and should be blurry in any case. The main point is the overall look and how much less useful information it gives you to work with. Again, these are all the messages I see on a 13" MacBook Air screen. I can work in a few more messages if I hit Cmd-minus often enough to shrink the font, but still a small fraction of what used to be there.

Thumbnail image for ChromeOffline.png

The new look is "brighter," airier, more colorful, and so on. It gives me a great big colorful initial letter for whoever is the addressee or sender of a message I'm reading -- for instance, the big green 'A' above. Goody! I feel like I'm back in elementary school, using my Crayolas on big wide-lined composition paper.

On the positive side, I understand that the "refreshed" look offers more keyboard shortcuts. But as in the Reader case, what I want -- more usable info -- is exactly what the redesign has just taken away.


3) An actual Offline Gmail bug. The Offline settings allow you to choose how much mail you'd like to have synched to your local computer, so you can work on it or refer to it while offline. The maximum available is mail from the past month, and here is how the settings box looks after you make that choice:

GmailMonth.png

Here's the bug: that time selection is for some reason not "sticky." Sooner or later, it inevitably re-sets itself to the minimum setting, which is mail from the past week only. Time and again I've had the experience of setting the choice to "past month"; getting on a plane or train a few days later; opening up Offline Gmail; and seeing the screen below, showing the the program in fact only has mail from the past week:

GmailWeek.png

Sometimes it takes a few days for the setting to auto-fail from "past month" to "past week." Sometimes, a week or more. But in my experience, sooner or later the change always occurs, and it never self-changes in the opposite way. In response, my "pre-trip checklist" now includes going into Offline Gmail the day before any long journey, changing the setting from "past week" to "past month," and letting the program re-sync to collect as much info as it can.

OK, Offline Gmail people: with your great new UI "refresh" out of the way, maybe you have more time to deal with program fundamentals. Could you fix this bug please?

Thus endeth my "everything is amazing and no one is happy" rant for the day.
_

* Of course I am aware of the cliche about any free service: If you're not paying, you're the product. Still, when I think of the panoply of Google products I use every day, I personally feel that I've come out far on the positive side on the bargain.

On the 'Idealistic' Case for War

As discussed previously here. One reader who served in the U.S. military during the Iraq era offers this argument:
Thumbnail image for IraqInvade2.jpgLet's see if we can make a better case for Iraq. I was a "liberal hawk," and I think I still am. In part I guess I was encouraged by the silence, or ecouragement, of the ex- Clintonites, and nobody beat the drum harder than the New Republic. [JF note: unless it was the WaPo's editorial page.]

But the reason I supported the war, and still suspect it was the least bad choice, isn't one you've addressed and it's one I find opponents tend to evade. I mean, sure, get rid of a bad guy, yes, maybe WMD, whatever. But the reason I thought we should go to war in 2003 is that the status quo ante really, really sucked.

I had been in the Arab world in the '90s and seen constant angry footage of people starving in a crumbling Iraq, held in that state by the U.S. military (I read figures of civilian lives lost, which are horrific -- and remember the UNICEF figure of 6,000 children under age 5 dying each month due to sanctions before the war). The large US military forces in Saudi Arabia protecting the Kurds, Basra and Kuwait infuriated folks -- remember it was bin Laden's big bitch -- and it ended soon after we went into Iraq. We had -- I think unwisely, but nonetheless -- effectively created client states in the North and South of Iraq dependent on US protection, and nobody has tried to make the case that there was any way to return Iraq to the Ba'athists without ugly consequences for those groups. And I've had the opportunity to speak with the airmen who flew the missions in support of that protection while under Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, and over a decade of that really dangerous work took a toll on them and their families. So I think the "let's not go to war" case might've been superior -- but let's not kid ourselves that it wasn't ugly, too.

In the early 2000s, the Bushies I think made the best of all possible options in pushing so-called "smart sanctions," saying, look, we're stuck in this mess for the long haul so let's invest the manpower to try real real hard to keep certain things out of the regime's hands, and get as much food and medicine into Iraq as we can. And I think they did the diplomacy OK -- at least, before the thing went up for a vote in summer 2001, other countries were making the right noises about it. There had just been an awfully contentious election, folks at least where I was were _mad_ and I heard a lot of crap about Bush trying to push this thing through the UN because of his pathological hatred of the Iraqis -- but it was crap. "Smart sanctions" was a good idea, actually. And it died an ugly death at the UN, so your choices at that point were, somehow unseat the regime, or continue with the sanctions regime as it was.

There are an awful lot of hard counterfactuals here. Who knew the Bushies would throw away a decade of expertise and interest in Iraq? And I have never understood why we needed to shepherd in a hand-picked government or even occupy the place -- I couldn't give a crap who rules Iraq so long as they know that if they mess with the populations in the North and South under U.S. protection they're going to get smashed -- but the war went the way it did and it was ugly, and we learned a lot of things about military accountability that, well, we're probably better off for having learned but it wasn't good. Certainly I didn't appreciate the importance of international "legitimacy" and alliance-building. But still I wish folks who opposed the war would have to append "I was for the continuation of the sanctions regime and basing forces in Saudi Arabia" (or else, "I was for the lifting of sanctions, and let what happens to the Kurds and Shi'a, happen") -- because it's a useful reminder that there wasn't a great path out of that hole. Some stuff's just really hard.
This is offered for the record, and as indeed a more fully argued version of the pro-war case. On specific points: 1) To me, the very high likelihood that "the Bushies would throw away a decade of expertise and interest" was among the reasons to fear a bleak outcome from the war; and 2) I am willing to say that I would have preferred continuation of sanctions, plus troops in Saudi Arabia, to launching the invasion.

From Mike Lofgren, oft-quoted here, author of The Party is Over:
The whole democracy thing fatigues me. Since Nebuchadnezzar, every regime that has set out to attack another regime has done so with multiple public justifications (yes, even the most totalitarian). In the age of mass media, the justifications have become more elaborate, but all of the rationales boil down to three basic themes: (1) they were going to attack us first (aka the Texas manslaughter defense: "I was just protecting myself in advance"); (2); that other regime is really awful; and (3) the people groaning under the rule of that regime will be much better off once we invade and depose the regime. The Bush administration employed slightly different rationales for whichever audience it was trying to convince, but its main themes fit the historical template. All the bloviating about exporting democracy to the Middle East drew mainly from rationales (2) and (3).
 
What struck me at the time of the Iraq invasion was that the neoconservatives and their fellow travelers, mainly Republican but also some Democrats, frequently displayed the most touching devotion (in public) to bringing democracy to the suffering peoples of the Middle East while evincing a high degree of cynicism (mainly in private) about how "Arabs only understand force." In some cases it wasn't even concealed, as Thomas Friedman demonstrated:
"What they [meaning Iraqis] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um, and basically saying, "Which  part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. . . . We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth." (Charlie Rose, 30 May 2003) 
Finally, from a person I know with long experience in national-level politics:
Not mentioned (this time) on your blog among the justifications for invading Iraq is what my "connected " (to Cheney and/or Rumsfeld) GOP friends told me during the run-up to the war, namely that although Saddam Hussein was not hosting terrorists himself, other nations were doing so with impunity because they believed the US would never strike their countries (as distinct from striking the terrorists), so they could sort of have their cake and eat it too. 

The US, having discovered on 9/11 how vulnerable it was ("soft defenses, etc.") needed to buy a little time by forcing the terrorists out of the safe harbor host states, thereby disrupting them for that time-buying purpose, while we "hardened" our defenses against terrorist attack. By showing the leaders of the host states that we could step in and overthrown a head of state such as Saddam Hussein, we would be demonstrating that we could do the same thing to them, too. Thus their reaction to our invasion of Iraq would be to kick the terrorists out of the safe harbors, for fear of being toppled by a US invasion themselves...

I recall saying, "Well, that's at least an explanation, but it has never been told to the American people."

To which the reply was, "We can't tell the American people, because we don't want the terrorists to recognize how vulnerable we are, how soft our defenses against them really are."

To which I said, "The terrorists presumably already know precisely how soft our defenses are; it would be the American people who don't, but who would if this explanation were offered in public." I also said, "This is why you should not go to war for reasons you don't disclose - disclosure allows the logic of your reasons to be tested," and I was pretty sure this purported reason could not withstand a public test.

Wiser folks than I have long observed that when there are several or many purported reasons for taking a particular course of action , rather than one agreed-upon reason, it often turns out that was really no reason at all for that course of action. I still think this observation is probably true for why we went to war in Iraq. We did not have a real reason.

The Sequester, Budget Policy, and the Future of U.S. Innovation

If you haven't come across it yet, please do see the open letter published yesterday on our Politics Channel from the directors of three of the U.S. National Labs. These places are famous around the world, and are rightly seen as symbols of American scientific excellence and bulwarks of long-term American strength. The three authors are Paul Alivisatos, Eric Isaacs, and Thom Mason, from, respectively, the Lawrence Berkeley, Argonne, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

The title of their essay gets the point across: "The Sequester Is Going to Devastate U.S. Science Research for Decades." That may sound extreme, but here is the heart of their case:
It's not yet clear how much funding the National Labs will lose, but it will total tens of millions of dollars. Interrupting -- or worse, halting -- basic research in the physical, biological, and computational sciences would be devastating, both for science and for the many U.S. industries that rely on our national laboratory system to power their research and development efforts.

Instead, this drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years. This sudden halt on new starts will freeze American science in place while the rest of the word races forward, and it will knock a generation of young scientists off their stride, ultimately costing billions in missed future opportunities.
My sense from afar is that an "oh, it's not really that bad" attitude is setting in about America's permanent-emergency approach to public funding. This is a reminder that it really could be that bad. And on that point, a scientist I know in California has written:
When I was a kid, in the 1970s, there were about 2000 'operational' weather balloon sites that released balloons synchronized to be in the middle of the troposphere at 00 and 12 UTZ daily.

When I did a survey of how many there were in 2000, there were about 800. There are myriad reasons, the relative poverty of many countries that can't afford to pay for the programs and geopolitics among them.

The number is about to drop precipitously due to a contrived crisis by a rich nation.

I am deeply ashamed for my country.

Why the TSA Is Right, and Markey and Schumer Are Wrong, About the Little Knives

Through the past decade I've argued that the most depressing and insidious aspect of America's "security theater" response to the 9/11 attacks is its ratchet-like nature. You can always add new security measures, or more precisely things that give the appearance of increased safety. You have a very hard time ever taking them away. 

Thus Richard Reid puts some explosives in his shoes in 2001, and nearly a dozen years later tens of millions of U.S. passengers are still taking their shoes off in security lines. (They don't do this in most other countries.) Officials thwart a plot to use liquid explosives in 2006, and ever since then we've had the "get rid of that bottle of water" rule and all associated effects.

The problematic point, again, is the one-way nature of these security reflexes. Politicians and regulators have every incentive to add them, and also every incentive not to take them away. For background on the ratchet of security, see two items from 2010 here and here, plus this interview with the head of the TSA from about the same time (plus this).

All this is why I congratulate the TSA for its gutsiness in daring to move back the ratchet, in saying that it's not going to worry about little knives on planes. Patrick Smith, of "Ask the Pilot," summarized why this makes sense when the decision was announced a few days ago:
TSA ... might not be willing to admit it, but they seem to have come to terms with two simple truths.

The first is that a potentially deadly sharp object -- a knife, if you will -- can be improvised from virtually anything, including no shortage of materials found on airplanes. Even a child knows this.... 

The second truth is that, from a terrorist's standpoint, the September 11th blueprint is no longer a useful strategy.... 

Conventional wisdom holds that the attacks succeeded because 19 hijackers took advantage of a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto jetliners. And conventional wisdom is wrong.

What the men actually took advantage of was a weakness in our thinking, and our presumptions of what a hijacking was, and how one would be expected to unfold, based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.
As Smith goes on to explain, and as has been discussed here over the years, "another 9/11 attack" will never occur. The flight crew won't allow it; the passengers won't allow it; the element of unimagined surprise was gone within hours of the original attack, when the passengers of United Flight 93 heroically took on the hijackers rather than letting their plane be used as a guided bomb. 

If you want to know why this move was gutsy and why the TSA deserves -- and needs -- public support for this kind of choice, you could reflect on the panicky political reaction it provoked. Just before leaving Shanghai for D.C. I caught some of it on Piers Morgan's show. Chuck Schumer, Ed Markey, John McCain, and Morgan himself were all upset that the TSA would make this "risky" move. I don't yet see a transcript, but The Verge has a summary. For instance here is Schumer's view, from a statement:
"Now is not the time for reduced vigilance," he said in a statement, "or to place additional burdens on TSA agents who should be looking for dangerous items, not wasting time measuring the length of a knife blade."
Oh please. This is less like "reduced vigilance" than like "sensible risk assessment." The main danger the TSA needs to worry about with airplanes is explosives on board, whether carried into the cabin or checked in cargo. If it tries to guard against every conceivable other threat, including 3-inch knives, from every single member of the flying public, it might as well not let anyone fly at all. The otherwise-admirable Ed Markey gives us the reaction that would keep TSA from ever undoing the ratchet:
"In the confined environment of an airplane, even a small blade in the hands of a terrorist can lead to disaster."
Patrick Smith makes the sanity-restoring counter point:
We need to get past the emotionally charged style of security-think that ultimately makes us less safe. These new measures are sensible, and meanwhile TSA can, or should, concentrate or more potent threats to safety -- your safety as well as mine -- such as bombs and explosives.
As does former TSA director Kip Hawley, here. Meanwhile politicians who give in to fraidy-cat reactions make it harder ever to evolve a sustainable security policy. That would be one in which we guard against the most catastrophic threats -- in the airlines' case, onboard explosions -- and concentrate on dangerous people -- while accepting other risks as the price of a free, non-police-state life. The politicians now fretting about the TSA have slowed the process of restoring normal free American life. 

I don't often find myself saying this, but: good, brave decision, people at TSA.

Aboard the Beijing-Shanghai Bullet Train

A few days ago my wife and I took the famed Chinese high-speed train from the Beijing South Station to Shanghai's Hongqiao. Total distance 800+ miles, travel time (including en-route stops) just over 5 hours, average cruising speed 300 kms per hour, or about 180 mph. Yes, you guessed it, that's more than twice as fast as the Amtrak Acela's average 80 mph between New York and Washington. 

You can name your policy argument about China's high-speed trains: Have they been a wasteful over-investment for a country whose peasants can't afford a ticket? Or do they by contrast show pride in infrastructure, vs. U.S. somnolence and failure to invest? Has China's Railroad Ministry, which just this week got re-organized out of existence, been too corrupt? What's the right balance between trains and planes in China's future transport mix? And on down the line. 

I'll leave those for another time. Right now, an idea of how it looks.

The sleek train on the platform:

Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Train1.jpg


The departure board, with bullet trains G125 and G127 from Beijing to Shanghai leaving five minutes apart:

Thumbnail image for train2.jpg


The stylish conductors, with their jazzy military-chic look: 

Thumbnail image for Train3.jpg


Similarly, with view of other station amenities:

HighSpdRail.png


Detail on the beach-resort ad you see near the top of the previous picture:

Train7.png


Some of the other passengers waiting for this same bullet train:

HighSpeedRail2.png


In the "soft-seat" luxury car, where we were. Note the out-the-window view; it was a rough air-quality day in northern China:

Thumbnail image for Train6.jpg

No larger policy point, apart from this being (like the much-slower Amtrak) by far the best way to get from the country's political capital to its financial capital. And the idea as always is to convey some of the varied texture of how modern China looks.

What the Iraq War Did to and for the Middle East

Thumbnail image for IraqInvade2.jpgTen years after the start of the Iraq War, it can be easy to lose sight of how much of the argument for it was idealistic. By that I don't mean that such arguments were correct or should have been convincing; obviously I think the reverse. Rather I mean to distinguish the casus belli that is now most often discussed -- the discredited and possibly manufactured warnings about Weapons of Mass Destruction -- from the vision expressed by the war's most serious-seeming advocates.

These were people for whom the WMD threat, or reminders about Saddam Hussein's [alleged] plot to murder the first President Bush, were useful ways to add urgency to what they viewed as the real, moral purposes in going to war. Depending on the advocate, these included: 
  • justified retribution for Saddam Hussein's brutality and atrocities against Kurds, Shia, and the Iraqi public in general; 
  • concern that the alternatives to war -- open-ended sanctions -- were mainly hurting the most vulnerable people in Iraq, including children who might starve or die from lack of medicine;
  • and, most sweeping of all, the potential of forced regime-change in Baghdad to set off a wave of liberalization and democratization that could free many other Arab and Islamic countries from tyranny and despotism. A wave of liberalization had swept through East Asia starting in the 1980s -- in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, elsewhere -- after the U.S. helped ease its former client Ferdinand Marcos out of office. Why not the Islamic world?
Many of that era's "liberal hawks" expressed one or more of these arguments. I associate the third -- the fact that the Arab/Islamic world deserves democracy, too -- closely with Paul Wolfowitz, a hawk though not in normal terms a liberal, after hearing him make this case during an interview in January 2002. Many other people I interviewed later that year had a much more fatalistic, wary sense of whether the United States could really midwife democracy via regime change.

We know how the WMD argument for the war stands up ten years later. What about the Wilsonian, moral case for democratizing the region as a whole? Fred Kaplan, of Slate and The Insurgents, examines that question today and says that it is another way in which the case for war was illusory and the decision to go to war was a huge mistake. For instance:
Ten years later, it's clear that the Iraq war cast "a very large shadow" indeed, but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity's natural state: Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface.
Kaplan bases part of his analysis on a book I found extremely useful and have often recommended in this space. That is A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin, which presents a history of the decaying Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century that should have guided our decisions about that same area in the early 21st.

No one ever really "learns" from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs. (As Ernest May and Richard Neustadt explained so well in Thinking in Time.) But it should have been easier to see the pitfalls of military action in Iraq, and we can't let this costly experience recede unexamined. Kaplan's piece is worth reading and thinking about.

Interesting Software: Search Visualizer

I won't try to explain this but will just suggest that you give it a try. It's Search Visualizer, a web-based system that processes search results from Google and other search engines and displays them in visual form. Here's an idea of how the results look, based on a sample search for data about the 787 Dreamliner's battery problems. 

SearchVisualizer.jpg

I've tried a variety of "search front-ends" over the years and so far have always ended up going back to plain old Google. I don't know whether Search Visualizer would meet the long-term usefulness test, but its approach is interesting. The company lays out scenarios in which it thinks such visualization would pay off.  Over to you to see whether in your search circumstances it makes sense.

False Equivalence: Going to the Source

More times than I would like, I have turned to the Washington Post's editorial page to illustrate classic "false equivalence" thinking. E.g.: one party filibusters all nominations; therefore "both sides" are to blame for jobs going unfilled. Last month I mentioned a WaPo pinnacle of this mentality.

If you would like to eliminate uncertainty about the origins of this view, I direct your attention to a signed contribution from the editor of the Post's editorial page, Fred Hiatt, on why "Obama could get things done by governing today." Please read this and see if your reaction is other than ... wow.

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Yes (the essay itself says), the Republicans are wrong in their extremism, and in their refusal to consider any increase in taxes, and in their willingness to filibuster anything. And, yes, the president has been offering compromises, in atmospherics and in substance. But still all sides are necessarily to blame for a partisan stand-off. And the president could solve this mess if he decided to "govern." The payoff of the column, in the form of an open-letter appeal to the president:
And beyond politics, on many of the biggest challenges you're going to need ideas from Column A and Column B... [Y]ou can't solve the debt challenge without raising more revenue and controlling entitlement costs... Eventually, in other words, you're going to have to wheel and deal and compromise -- you're going to have to govern. It might as well be now.
OK. Let's suppose you believed this. What, exactly, does it mean? What does Obama do tomorrow? Or, better, "today"?
  • Does he propose a budget plan modeled on ideas from revered centrists like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, or Robert Rubin? Oh, wait, he's already done that.
  • Does he propose dealing with entitlement reforms? Oh, wait, that was in the State of the Union address.
How about if you, WaPo, try setting out what you consider a "balanced" package of budget reforms -- and then, after giving the details, see if the Administration and the House Republicans agree. My money is on the administration saying, let's look at this, and the House Republicans saying, No. And then ... what? The twin reflexes of D.C. centrist thinking are assuming (a) that a president can "lead" or "govern" his way out of any corner, and (b) that [except for provision (a)] you can't ever really declare one side in a dispute "wrong." Therefore this scenario would presumably end with another plea to the president to "take control."

For more on the intractability of false-equivalence thinking, see this today from Greg Sargent in (another part of) the WaPo:
Imagine that Mitt Romney had decisively defeated Obama in the 2012 election on a platform of tax cuts for the rich and deep cuts to government as the only way to reduce the deficit, dramatically repudiating the President's call for higher taxes on the wealthy, continued implementation of the biggest expansion of the safety net in 60 years, and more government spending to boost the economy.

Then imagine that Democrats in the Senate (the only part of government they controlled) responded to this by proposing to dramatically expand health care and stimulus spending and pay down the deficit only with 100 percent tax hikes -- and not a single penny more in spending cuts -- and on top of that, then suggested President Romney has failed to sincerely try to find common ground with them.
The reassuring aspect of this signed piece is insight as to whence the unsigned editorials arise.

Forgotten War, Forgotten Deaths

Thumbnail image for IraqInvade2.jpgWith a few weeks' retrospect, it's clear that the most objectionable part of the Chuck Hagel confirmation melee was not the personal smears, nor the posturing by Senators Graham and McCain et al, nor the first-ever filibuster of a SecDef nomination by senators who didn't want their blocking tactic to be called by its real name, nor even the demand by Senator Ted Cruz that Hagel disprove pulled-from-thin-air insinuations that he could be on the North Korean payroll.

The most objectionable part, of a process supposedly meant to assess the fitness of a former senator and wounded combat veteran to serve as civilian head of the military, was most senators' apparent boredom with the war in which American troops were being killed and wounded even as they spoke. Oh, that war, the one in Afghanistan. The one in which an average of six Americans per week were killed last year. Here are their names. The famous Word Cloud of questions by Senate Armed Services Committee members showed the mind-space, among our legislative leaders, that Afghanistan now claims:
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Why bring this up when looking back on 10 years of war in Iraq? The connection is that the situation in Afghanistan has festered so long largely because American strategy, troops, money, material, and effort were prematurely diverted for five or six years, starting midway through 2002, because of the impending invasion of Iraq. As we reflect on the cost of that diversion, here are two memorable pieces of writing to seek out.

One is Brian Mockenhaupt's "The Living and the Dead," about the members of a USMC platoon in Afghanistan. I hope you will set this aside for a half-hour's sustained reading. I predict that if you do you will think about the people serving in our country's name, and their sacrifice, for a long time.

The other is Gerald Seymour's novel A Deniable Death. At face value this is entirely different from Mockenhaupt's careful journalism. Seymour is a veteran thriller-writer, and this is a genuinely gripping page-turner. But it is about the same moral drama that is described in "The Living and the Dead," and whose consequences Chuck Hagel must now deal with, and that the senators mostly ignored. A brief sample, involving one of the book's major figures: an Iranian engineer who excels in the art of making extremely damaging "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs for Iraq and then Afghanistan:
He would tell his audience of the effect that the explosive devices... had on units' morale, and give them, as a rallying cry, the conclusion that one casualty, without a leg or arm, needed four men to bring him back from an explosion and a helicopter to fly him to the rear...

He spoke, too, of the medium-term damage to troops' psychology, if they had been exposed to situations where bombs were widespread, particularly if there had been casualties in their unit: a larger number of enemy combatants in the Iraq war had gone home with post-traumatic stress disorder, as sick as if they had been severely wounded, and would not return.
The wars have rolled on, with most of America not noticing. I am writing this item mainly to suggest that Brian Mockenhaupt's essay, in particular, will make you reflect on the choices the country has made. 

Seth MacFarlane Is Big in China

One of many charming touches in Seth MacFarlane's Oscar-hosting role -- remember that? -- was the line about those wacky, funny-talking Hispanics. It was a good thing, he said, that Salma Hayek, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz were all so easy on the eyes, since "we" could barely understand a word they say.

Seth got some flak for that in America, but they appreciate him here in China. According to Still and Always My Favorite Newspaper™, the China Daily, the country's foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, had this exchange with a French reporter at his news conference yesterday. Here's how the story looks, with details below:

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Foreign reporters flaunt their Mandarin skills
Caroline Puel, French magazine Le Point correspondent in Beijing, was surprised twice on Saturday at the press conference with China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.

Besides getting a chance to ask a question out of the hundreds of reporters at the scene, Puel also got high marks from Yang for her Chinese.

"Your Chinese is so good I can understand your question without asking you to repeat it", Yang told her with a big smile.
Yes, I did notice the "with a big smile" touch; and this story caught my eye mainly because I find it droll. At the same time, I am trying to imagine the counterpart in America: a Secretary of State Clinton or Kerry hearing a question from a German or Japanese reporter and, before answering, noting that the questioner's English is "so good" that it can actually be understood. It's another little marker on the long road of China's developing a sense of ease as an international presence and power.

Bonus Favorite Newspaper™ Detail. Here's today's front page:

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Yeah, I could go for some of those cyber rules myself. This morning all of my normal VPNs appear to be blocked, and I am filing this by working out some rococo routing to the Atlantic's corporate VPN, which is not really designed for this sort of international intrigue. The accompanying story is actually worth reading for the Chinese perspective on the ongoing cyber wars. For instance this detail, which is how the situation is often described from the Chinese point of view:
Cyber security has become an increasingly prominent issue as security threats in a peaceful era, and seems another way for Western powers to apply pressure to contain China's rise, they [various Chinese officials] say.

Wen Weiping, a professor at the School of Software and Microelectronics at Peking University, put forward his explanation on the belligerence.

The US believes it is justified to launch military attacks on any country that launches cyber attacks threatening its cyber space, he said, and it must raise a fuss against such alleged attacks to build up a case. Wen said the US also aims to strengthen its cyber security forces as a deterrent and maintain its advantage during the information war.

Winning in China: Henry Winter's Story

On our China Channel, Eli Bildner posted an eloquent appreciation of Henry Winter, an American who had made a big impression in China before his death last year, from a cerebral hemorrhage, at age 43. I mention it now for these reasons:

- To encourage you to read it. I never met Henry Winter, but I feel as if I know him thanks to this essay. And, as you will see, Bildner is writing about much more.

- To point you to two items of context about Win in China, the idealistic/crazy game show on Chinese TV that made Henry Winter famous there. One is my article on the show's early days back in 2007; the other is an item about Ole Schell's documentary film on the program.

- To embed a clip of one famous moment from the show, which Bildner describes. This is when Henry Winter exchanges quick repartee, all in Mandarin, with the judges on this Chinese reality-TV show. Eli Bildner describes one of the exchanges:
In a question-and-answer session following Henry's pitch, one of the panel's three judges, a software billionaire named Shi Zhuyu, asks Henry whether he is just a "floral piece" for his company. At first, Henry looks confused, and the show's host -- thinking that perhaps Henry had become lost in the rapid-fire Mandarin -- interjects to clarify:

"Are you just one of those good-looking but useless CEOs?" she asks.

"I got it the first time," Henry replies with a grin. "I was just waiting for him to ask a bit more tactfully."
You can see that exchange starting shortly after time 3:00 of the short clip below. His "bit more tactfully" zinger, and the laughing reply by its target and the Chinese audience, is around time 3:35. Even if you don't understand a word of it you will enjoy the personal dynamics that need no interpretation, including the pose Henry Winter strikes around time 3:18.


I'm sorry never to have met Henry Winter, and am glad for Bildner's effort to see that he is remembered.

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